No, Infections Don't Appear Beneficial
Somehow in the argument of whether we should avoid SARS Cov 2 infections, it was proposed that people may be worse off by not gaining immunity via infection to viruses. It went as far as some suggesting since we have been infected with viruses all this time in evolution, that we may be missing benefits or necessary immune education. This emerged as a cynical elaboration to the hygiene hypothesis, which posits that beneficial bacteria prevent autoimmunity and benefit the immune syndrome.
The recent hypothesis is a kind of apologism for infection, but nevertheless, deserves analysis. A recent study allows for such an analysis in a correlative way. The study split children between frequently infected and less frequently infected. Also, and this is important, individuals that were immunocompromized were excluded from the study. This is important because it is expected that immunocompromized people will not gain immunity from infections to the extent that immune replete people would.
What is interesting is that the study found that individuals with less frequent infections in childhood also had less frequent infections in adolescence. Individuals with frequent infections in childhood had more moderate and severe infections than the other children in adolescence but also infections decreased compared to when they were younger.
We can say this corresponds with a facet of knowledge of immunity: In childhood we are frequently infected with bugs and this decreases with age and experience. However, it challenges the notion that each infection caught earlier staves off later infection in equal measure and reduces the severity. Instead, those with frequent infections continued the trend. What does it mean? That there is not a dominant effect of the number of infections conferring an immunity benefit. If there were, and if the effect were dominant, then we would have seen that individuals with frequent infections early in life would have fewer infections later.
It also means that severity of infections is not a function of novelty, but rather intrinsic from the immune system. There remain two hypotheses of why infections were more frequently severe later in life in the people frequently infected in childhood
That despite removing immunocompromised individuals from the cohort, there is some kind of immune problem these individuals had to begin with
or
Frequent infections predispose to severe disease by virtue of aging or dysregulating the immune system
We will address this topic later, but my hypothesis is frequent or sustained immune activation can lead to decompensatory or poor responses later on.
Yours,
AJ
Love seeing your name in my email.
Thank you for the update.
As someone with ongoing sarscov2 infection (the terms long covid and post covid are incorrect-imo), my one infection ruined my life. And my spouse gave it to me. Otherwise, with my precautions, I would not be sick and would not have brain damage from sarscov2, or had sepsis. So many people are in the icu with pneumonia and sepsis. Not a good combination.
Always exciting to see you in the arena educating us poor dolts.
The data you present appears to suggest that "training of innate immunity" might not be as beneficial as some have suggested. Is that a logical conclusion of the research presented OR is it too much of an extrapolation of the findings presented?